Web Space

Web Space

This page and the entire Web Space pull down menu contains information about creating and maintaining your own website here on Eskimo North. The ability to host a website under our domain is included with every shell account. In addition we can host your domain with a virtual domain or personal or business web hosting package.

Basics and File Locations

Website creation primarily involves creating two types of files, HTML files which contain the basic content of your website and CSS files which define the layout and appearance of your website. In addition, your website may contain various media files such as images, video, or audio that are referenced by your HTML or CSS code. You can create these files by hand or you can use content management systems such as WordPress.

Both HTML and CSS are ordinary text files that can be created with any ordinary text editor although specialized WYSIWYG editors, like Bluefish and DreamWeaver, make the job much easier.

Content management systems like WordPress use PHP, a server side scripting language, in conjunction with a MySQL database to create pages on the fly as they are requested. You edit these types of websites from within the site itself using a built-in editor.

CSS files are optional. Without CSS, the web browser will pick default methods of displaying your web page. CSS files allow you to specify exactly how the web page should be displayed including things such as overall layout, font style, type, color, background colors and images, whether the background scrolls or is nailed in place, and many other things. In addition, with CSS you can use media queries, conditional code that allow you to display your web page differently depending upon the device viewing it.

Interactive sites may include PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, Haskell, and CGI script files that do server side processing and create dynamic pages. Please see the Web Space pull down menu for more details.

Every shell account as well as regular dial-up and DSL accounts includes web hosting space under “eskimo.com”. The following table lays out the relationship between file location and URL. Please note that “~” represents your home directory and “user” in the URL represents your login.

Please note that “www.eskimo.com” is intended to be family friendly. Any material placed in your public_html directory must be suitable for all ages. Adult oriented material should be placed in adult_html so that it shows up on “adult.eskimo.com“. These directories do not exist until you create them. Also, they should be publicly readable and searchable for the web server to be able to serve pages from them.

There are several ways you can do this. You can login to shell and use the mkdir and chmod commands: mkdir public_html; chmod 755 public_html. If you create websites on your computer and then upload them with ftp, the ftp client will also have a mkdir command or it’s equivalent.

Under the windows command prompt, the ftp command has a mkdir command once you are connected to our ftp server and logged in. Also, graphical ftp clients like filezilla have a way to create a folder on the destination machine.You can create your website on your computer and then upload (publish) it with ftp, or you can create it online using tools provided here.

Your index page must be named index.html, index.htm, or index.php. If your page contains php code, it must be named index.php unless you make arrangements to have other extensions parsed in an .htaccess file.

Normal file modes for .html files are 0644, but for php files 0755, and if you have server side includes, chmod to 0754 to cause PHP to parse them for the Apache web server to include directives.

The terms “directory” and “folder” are interchangeable. Windows tends to use the term “folder”, while Unix-like operating systems such as Linux use the term “directory”, although recently there has been a trend to Windowize Linux and some more recent graphical programs will refer to directories as folders. The term directory is more accurate in that files listed in a directory are just pointers to the actual file location, the files aren’t actually contained within the directory physically like files in a folder.